Re: [xmca] A funny quote: Luria, A.N. Leontiev, & Velichkovsky :)

[David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>]

Mike, Andy, Bella:
 
I too am not very interested in the personal side of the dispute, and I'm not even sure there was one. My own experience of various intellectual falling outs in periods of great social tension and state violence tells me that in the long run only the issues count.
 
But "Language and Cognition", like "The Nature of Human Conflicts", is an interesting book. As Wertsch points out, ARL is in some ways a little too permeable (he has a fondness for generative grammar, and sometimes appears to think that "znachenie" means "denotation" and other times thinks it means something like "theme" as opposed to "rheme"). 
 
A great deal of the book, however, seems to be devoted to making two points very forcefully:
 
a) Human language is sui generis; there is nothing like it in the animal world, and it is not reducible to object oriented activity.
 
b) What makes it sui generis is not the indicative ("sympractic") function or even the nominative ("theme") function but rather the ideational, "signifying" function.
 
Why does he stress these two points? Well, I think Mike is right to point us in the direction of the "Nature of Human Conflicts" and the combined motor method for an answer. He wants to draw the line that separates language from object-oriented activity, and by extension humans from animals, and children from adults, here: the signifying function of language.
 
And why does that matter? Well, ARL is working within a "second signal system" framework, the form of Neo-Pavlovism that the Soviet psychology of the late forties and fifties used to cope with language issues. This is a framework that strongly favours CONTINUITY with animals and SYMPRACTIC functioning in language.
 
ARL is swimming against the stream. He has to accept the language of the times, and so he does talk about the second signal system and he does mention Leontiev's activity theory. But it's clear to me that he is bending the stick the other way and says things that will make Martin's skin crawl, e.g. 
 
"The crucial problem of consciousness concerns how humans reflect the real world in which they live (i.e. how they form a subjective image of the objective world." (p. 17).
 
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education

--- On Thu, 1/8/09, Mike Cole <lchcmike@gmail.com> wrote:

From: Mike Cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [xmca] A funny quote: Luria, A.N. Leontiev, & Velichkovsky :)
To: ablunden@mira.net, "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Cc: vaughndogblack@yahoo.com
Date: Thursday, January 8, 2009, 8:17 AM


Fascinating everyone's fascination with the tensions between Vygotsky and his students and among the students. I too, have stories straight from various
horse's mouths. Dead, now, those horses, for the most part.

25 years after the personal tensions exhibited here, the principal parties, despite their differences, were cooperating in the recovery of Vygotsky's ideas.
They had managed to re-connect in sufficient closenes so that others, for example, the students of Rubenshtein and allies, could treat them as "the bad guys" (collectively) and drive them from positions of power in Soviet Psychology which THEY put on the map. 

I personally do not find any of this kind of speculation and detective work help in trying to develop a cultural-historical psychology founded in everyday human activities. I find the efforts of members of XMCA who struggle wtih the texts, try to weed our gold from dross, to recoup the logic and the empirical
evidence of research, and who do this in an attempt to create a more adequate study of human beings in the service of a more humane human life world, far more enlightening.

For example, we do not have, despite the efforts of several, a good chronology of the LSV texts, let alone a chronology that puts it in the historical contexts of its specific times, and from 1928-1934 the time they were a changing, rapidly and dangerously, in Moscow, Kharkov, and Leningrad.

My .05 cents worth.
mike


On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 9:23 PM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:

And the contempt was flowing in more than one direction. See attached letter from ANL to LSV about ARL.


Andy

David Kellogg wrote:

Bella--
 Yes, it's hard to imagine. But consider this account of Leontiev's work from Luria:
 "Social labor and the division of labor result in indirect behavior which is subject to social as well as biological stimuli. It is precisely these factors which give rise to new nonbiological human needs. Thus are formed those specifically human forms of mental activity. This activity can give rise to intiating stimuli and goals which in turn lead to specific acts. These acts are carried out by the appropriate set of operations. The structure of the complex forms of human activity has been worked out in detail in Soviet psychology by A.N. Leontiev. We will not, therefore, dwell on this question in greater detail here."
 What does that LAST lukewarm sentence really mean, here on p. 26 of a 246 page book entitled "Language and Cognition"? (1981, New York: Wiley).
 To me it can only mean one of two things:
 a) Leontiev's account of activity is okay as far as it goes, but it does not go as far as language or cognition.
 b) Leontiev's account of activity does go far as language and cognition, but it is not a scientifically valid account.
 Of course, what ARL really says is a) and not b). But that would mean that ARL considers that neither language nor cognition are specifically human forms of activity. So perhaps a) is simply a diplomatic way of saying b)?
 David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
  

--- On Tue, 1/6/09, Bella Kotik-Friedgut <bella.kotik@gmail.com> wrote:

From: Bella Kotik-Friedgut <bella.kotik@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [xmca] A funny quote: Luria, A.N. Leontiev, & Velichkovsky :)
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Tuesday, January 6, 2009, 7:50 AM

As far as I knew ARL I can only say  that it is hard to believe he would use
such a harsh language speaking about Leontjev.

On Tue, Jan 6, 2009 at 3:36 PM, Steve Gabosch <stevegabosch@me.com>
wrote:


Interesting anecdotal story.  It raises a question I am very curious
about.

 What is known of Luria's assessment of Leontiev's activity theory
and

theory of animal psychic evolution?
- Steve



On Jan 5, 2009, at 10:54 PM, Anton Yasnitsky wrote:

I just came across this text and thought this might be of some interest to

some people out there. In his interview about A.N. Leontiev taken on
September 12, 2002 Boris Velichkovsky mentioned inter alia  that
"Alexander


Romanovich [Luria] once quite harshly put it in my presence that he
did not


consider as related to scientific research anything that Leontiev was
doing


from the beginning of the 1940s onwards". Literally, --

Алек сандр Ро ма но вич од на ж ды до
воль но же ст ко ска зал в мо ем при


сут ст вии,
что не счи та ет то, что де ла ет Ле он
ть ев с на ча ла 40‑х го дов имею


щим
от но ше ние к нау ке (
http://www.anleontiev.smysl.ru/vospomin/i-velich.htm


)

Just I guess some food for thought about the school of
Vygotsky-Leontiev-Luria (not sure about the canonical order of the
names)


and the theoretical foundations of the so-called CHAT :)...



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-- 
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Andy Blunden http://home.mira.net/~andy/ 


      
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